The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 1

by Theodor Mommsen

CHAPTER VI.

THE DANUBIAN LANDS AND THE WARS ON THE DANUBE.

Arrangements of Augustus.As the frontier on the Rhine was the work of Caesar, so the frontier on the Danube was the work of Augustus. When he came to the helm, the Romans were in the Italian peninsula hardly masters of the Alps, and in the Greek peninsula hardly masters of the Haemus (Balkan) and of the coast districts along the Adriatic and the Black Sea; nowhere did their territory reach the mighty stream which separates southern from northern Europe. As well northern Italy as the Illyrian and Pontic commercial towns, and still more the civilised provinces of Macedonia and Thrace, were constantly exposed to the predatory expeditions of the rude and restless neighbouring tribes. When Augustus died there were substituted for the one province of Illyricum, which had barely attained to independent administration, five great Roman administrative districts, Raetia, Noricum, Lower Illyria or Pannonia, Upper Illyria or Dalmatia, and Moesia; and the Danube became in its whole course, if not everywhere the military, at any rate the political, frontier of the empire. The comparatively easy subjugation of these wide territories, as well as the grave insurrection of the years 6–9, and the abandonment, thereby occasioned, of the formerly cherished purpose of shifting the boundary–line from the upper Danube to Bohemia and to the Elbe, have been formerly described. It remains that we should set forth the development of these provinces in the time after Augustus and the relations of the Romans to the tribes dwelling beyond the Danube.

Late civilisation in Raetia.The destinies of Raetia were so closely interwoven with those of the upper German province that we might refer for them to the earlier narrative. Roman civilisation here, taken as a whole, underwent but little development. The highlands of the Alps with the valleys of the upper Inn and the upper Rhine embraced a weak and peculiar population, probably the same as had once possessed the eastern half of the north–Italian plain, perhaps akin to the Etruscans. Driven back thence by the Celts, and perhaps also by the Illyrici, it held its ground in the northern mountains. While the valleys opening to the south, like that of the Adige, were attached to Italy, these offered to the southerns little room and still less incitement for settlement and founding of towns. Farther northward on the plateau between the lake of Constance and the Inn, which was occupied by the Celtic tribes of the Vindelici, there would doubtless have been room and place for Roman culture; but apparently in this region, which could not become, like the Norican, an immediate continuation of Italy, and which, like the adjacent so–called Decumates–land, was probably in the first instance of value for the Romans merely as separating them from the Germans, the policy of the earlier imperial period had rather repressed culture. We have already indicated [p. 18]) that immediately after the conquest there were thoughts of depopulating the district. Alongside of this lies the fact, that in the earlier imperial period no community with Roman organisation originated here. It is true that the founding of Augusta Vindelicorum, the modern Augsburg, was a necessary part of the laying out of the great road which was carried, simultaneously with the conquest itself, by the elder Drusus through the high Alps to the Danube (pp. [19], [20]); but this rapidly flourishing place was, and remained for above a century, a market–village, till at length Hadrian in this respect left the path prescribed by Augustus and made the land of the Vindelici share in the Romanising of the north. The bestowal of Roman urban rights on the chief place of the Vindelici by Hadrian may be connected with the fact that, nearly about the same time, the military frontier was pushed forward on the upper Rhine, and Roman towns arose in the former Decumates–land; nevertheless in Raetia ever afterwards Augusta remained the only larger centre of Roman civilisation. The military arrangements exercised an influence in keeping it back. The province was from the first under imperial administration, and could not be left without a garrison; but special considerations, as we have formerly shown, compelled the government to send to Raetia simply troops of the second class, and, though these were not inconsiderable in number, the smaller headquarters of alae and cohortes could not have exercised a civilising and town–forming effect like the camp of the legion. Under Marcus certainly, in consequence of the Marcomanian war, the Raetian headquarters, Castra Regina, the modern Ratisbon, was occupied by a legion; but even this place appears to have remained in the Roman time a mere military settlement, and hardly to have stood on a line in urban development with the camps of second rank on the Rhine, such as e.g. Bonna.

The Raetian Limes.That the frontier of Raetia was already in Trajan’s time pushed forward from Ratisbon westward some distance beyond the Danube, has already been observed ([p. 158]); and it has been there also shown that this territory was probably annexed to the empire without applying force of arms, similarly with the Decumates–land. It was likewise already mentioned that the fortifying of this territory was perhaps connected with the incursions of the Chatti extending thus far under Marcus, as also that these and subsequently the Alamanni in the third century visited as well this country in front as Raetia itself, and ultimately under Gallienus wrested it from the Romans.

The Italising of Noricum.The neighbouring province of Noricum was doubtless in the provincial arrangement treated similarly to Raetia, but in other respects had a different development. In no direction was Italy so open for land–traffic as towards the north–east; the commercial relations of Aquileia, as well through Friuli with the upper Danube and with the iron–works of Noreia, as over the Julian Alps with the valley of the Save, here paved the way for the Augustan extension of the frontier as nowhere else in the region of the Danube. Nauportus (Upper Laybach) beyond the pass was a Roman trading village already in the time of the republic; Emona (Laybach), a Roman burgess–colony, afterwards formally incorporated with Italy, but substantially belonging to Italy from the time of its foundation by Augustus. Hence, as has already been noticed ([p. 18]), the mere proclamation was probably enough for the conversion of this “kingdom” into a Roman province. The population, originally doubtless Illyrian, afterwards in good part Celtic, shows no trace of that adherence to the national ways and language which we perceive among the Celts of the west. Roman language and Roman manners must have found early entrance here; and by the emperor Claudius the whole territory, even the northern portion separated by the Tauern chain from the valley of the Drave, was organised in accordance with the Italian municipal constitution. While in the neighbouring lands of Raetia and Pannonia the monuments of Roman language are either wanting or appear withal only at the larger centres, the valleys of the Drave, the Mur, and the Salzach and their affluents are filled far up into the mountains with evidences of the Romanising which here took deep hold. Noricum adjoined, and was as it were a part of, Italy; in the levy for the legions and for the guard, so long as the Italians were here at all preferred, this preference was extended to no other province so fully as to this.

As respects military occupation what applies to Raetia applies also to Noricum. For the reasons already developed there were in Noricum, during the first two centuries of the empire, only forts of alae and cohortes. Carnuntum (Petronell, near Vienna), which in the Augustan age belonged to Noricum, was, when the Illyrian legions were sent thither, annexed for that very reason to Pannonia. The smaller Norican encampments on the Danube, and even the camp of Lauriacum (near Enns), instituted by Marcus for the legion sent by him to this province, were of no importance for the urban development. The large townships of Noricum, such as Celeia (Cilli), in the valley of the Sann, Aguontum (Lienz), Teurnia (not far from Spital), Virunum (Zollfeld, near Klagenfurt), in the north Juvavum (Salzburg), originated purely out of civil elements.

The Illyrian stock.Illyricum, that is the Roman territory between Italy and Macedonia, was in the republican time united, as to its lesser portion, with the Graeco–Macedonian governorship, as to its greater, administered as a land adjacent to Italy, and, after the institution of the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul, as a portion of the latter. The territory coincides to a certain degree with the widely diffused stock from which the Romans named it; it is the same whose scanty remnant still at the present day, at the southern end of its formerly far–extended possessions, has preserved its own nationality and its old language under the name of Skipetars, which they assign to themselves, or, as their neighbours call them, the Arnauts or Albanians. It is a member of the Indo–Germanic family, and within it doubtless most closely akin to the Greek branch, as is in keeping with its local relations; but it stands by the side of the Greek at least as independent as the Latin and the Celtic. This nation in its original extent filled the coast of the Adriatic Sea from the mouth of the Po through Istria, Dalmatia, and Epirus, as far as Acarnania and Aetolia, and also in the interior upper Macedonia, as well as the modern Servia and Bosnia and the Hungarian territory on the right bank of the Danube; it bordered thus on the east with the Thracian tribes, on the west with the Celtic, from which latter Tacitus expressly distinguishes them. It is a vigorous type of a southern kind, with black hair and dark eyes, very different from the Celts, and still more from the Germans; sober, temperate, intrepid, proud people, excellent soldiers, but little accessible to civic organisation, shepherds more than agriculturists. They did not attain any great political development. On the Italian coast they were confronted probably, in the first instance, by the Celts; the probably Illyrian tribes there, especially the Veneti, became, through rivalry with the Celts, at an early date pliant subjects of the Romans.